The fruits of Sponsorhip at the "Kitchen Table AA with gumbo" workshop in Now Orleans, LA

Thanks folks. G Alcoholic.

And

so there's some new guys here and you know, if I say I haven't had anything to drink since the second day of May in 1979, you look at me and go, dude, how pathetic is your life? Obviously drinking didn't mean anything to you. And so I want you to take a look. This is a picture of me when it was still working in 1977. Blacked out in the morning.

So just so you, I really did drink and use UK.

So I would like to call this kitchen table A A.

And the reason is, is that we believe the heart and soul of Alcoholics Anonymous happens with one alcoholic talking to another across the across the kitchen table. And what I'm going to share with you this morning is kind of the historical legacy of this thing that we call sponsorship. Now, Bill Wilson said that if he was going to tell the story of Alcoholics Anonymous, that he where he could start with was Noah.

But we don't have that much time. So we're going to start a little closer to us. And this is a picture of Bill and his sponsor, Abby. And he said that he says in here that Abby, he came to the hospital bringing me a copy of book, a book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

He said. This book gave me the realization that most conversion experiences,

whatever their variety,

do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth. OK, now I'm going to be using some words in this history talk that have all kinds of weird connotations to it. OK, so just realize that it's medieval language when we're talking about conversion, not talking about putting your hands on the television set. OK, well what it what it is that I'm talking about is a change that happens

to people. And this is the book was written in 1902 by this guy, William James, who was an American, who is describing the different types of spiritual experiences that people had and how it is that they had them.

And this word conversion, what it means in this book is the process, either gradual or sudden,

by which itself, which beforehand is divided and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy,

becomes unified, consciously right, superior and happy.

I think this happens in just about every a, a meeting there is. We come in feeling separate, different, alone, and then we find out that we're part of something bigger, part of something different. And So what we're talking about then is conversion is a process of becoming whole

and don't hold any specific religion tenet on it when I say that word conversion, OK.

And in it James talks about who are the people that are available for this experience? And it's these people that are wrong living that they have impotent aspirations, they're self loathing, self despairing, They have an unintelligible,

an intolerable burden to which they are mysteriously heir. In other words, like for me, I couldn't stop drinking, I couldn't stop using, I couldn't stop lying. I couldn't stop spending the rent money or the food money or the milk money.

How did I get here? How did I get here? And I was, I was lost.

So this is where I like to start the history talk is this guy by the name of Frank Bookman. Frank Bookman was a Lutheran minister. He was American. He was born in Allentown, PA. And he had an experience where he was running a, a, a Hospice, a hostel for young men in the slums of Philadelphia.

Bring them in kind of like halfway house. Bring them, give them place to to clean up, have something to eat, little Bible study.

And he poured his soul into it and it got very, very successful. Got so successful that the guys were eating more than the parish was willing to

willing to pay for. And so they said, hey, you got to cut back on what you're giving the kids to eat. And he said, no, you can't do that. It's the food that gets them in the door. You know, you got to talk to people where they are. And so he quit

and he had just a little bit of resentment and it burned him for a long time. And it got to the point where, you know, he, he, he forget about it for a little while, but it, it just was eating him up and eating him up. And he ended up in this place in, in Keswick, England. And he was listening to this woman talk.

And as he was listening to her talk,

he had this, he was looking at this cross and it he had this image of it collapsing into an eye. And he goes, Oh my gosh, I'm the wrong guy in here too. It's not just them. I got a part in this. And after he had that little vision, he went back and he wrote letters of apologies. He wrote a men's letters to these people that he hated saying, I've held ill will against you. Will you please forgive me? And when he did that,

it vanished

and he went, wow, this is really cool. And what happened over the next few weeks is that when he started talking to people about having a spiritual experience, they were able to hear him. In other words, what he found was is that he had to be clear himself in order to carry a message of depth and weight. And so anyway, this is the guy that that I kind of call the Uber sponsor of of.

And this is him in China and he was over in China and he was talking to groups and and he got out and he was talking to different groups of missionaries about the thing that you can have all the book knowledge in the world, but if you're not clean inside yourself. So it was going around talking about doing inventory

and, and making amends and then looking for guidance on how to live your life.

And

the other thing that he talked about was that there were four standards. They called him the four absolutes back in the day. And then if you had any difficulty in your life that all you had to do was figure out, run it by these four things. Is it honest? Is it pure? Is it unselfish? And is it loving? And if it doesn't match up to it, you know, OK, well, I'm not supposed to do that. Kind of simple, but, but for people like me, you know, I didn't have any

ways, any, any compass to work. And this was the compass that they taught. And the all the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous were members of this thing called the Oxford Group

1932. There was a great book called. I think it's a great book, great title, at least called I Was a Pagan by a guy by the name of Vic Kitchen. And he talks about that The Oxford Group had a power I did not have. They said, however, that I could have it

just as they did if I would pay the same price, comply with the same conditions and go through the same series of exceedingly simple steps. Steps. Boy, that's a they stole. Oh, it was before a a was started. So what I'm trying to say is, is that you were part of

a lineage of folks had been working steps, but we found ones that work specifically for weirdos like us.

Thanks.

So what were the Oxford Group steps? Well, they had forum. They only had four steps. The first one was that what what we would call doing a fourth and 5th step. They called it sharing and that was the sharing of our sins and temptations with another Christian life given to God and using sharing his witness to help others still unchanged to recognize and acknowledge their sins. So in other words, the way that they do it is a little different than what the what we in a a would do. But they would sit down, say, I know Bill

and I know the Bill's got trouble at home

and he's drinking too much. And his wife

has a lot of adjectives that she's using about him and she doesn't understand. Yeah. And. And So what I do is I say, hey, Bill, let's get together. And, you know, and I and I sit down and. And what I do is I talk about what I used to be like and that I couldn't stop drinking and that she didn't understand and how unfair it all is. Let him know that I've been there. And then hopefully he'd say, wow,

and you're not like this anymore. I'd say, yeah, I'm not like this anymore.

And so that'd be the way that they do it. So in other words, that the sponsor would actually kind of lead off and talk about what their problems work. And hopefully, if maybe not in that conversation, but in some conversation along the line, you'd go, Oh yeah, that's me, 'cause So the first thing is this identification at depth and they called it sharing. The second would be what we call our our third step, the surrender of our lives,

past, present and future, into God's keeping and direction.

So you go unless

I need help. Help me, please.

The third step in the Oxford Group was restitution to all whom we have wronged, directly or indirectly.

What an order. I can't go through with it,

but the idea is that we got to make amends. We got to make amends

and then the 4th is listening to accepting and relying on God's guidance and carrying it out and everything we do or say great or small, which if you want to know about the way that the Oxford Group guide guidance, All you got to do is look at our 11th step in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. So this is just to let you know that that that this thing has been being sifted and tuned and and and life along the the years.

Here's a third step prayer.

I like it better than the one in the big book. Oh my God, how can you stay sober saying that? But I think this is a really cool one. He says, I surrender thee. My entire life, Oh God, I've made a mess of it trying to run it myself. You take it, the whole thing and run it for me according to your will and plan.

This guy Victoria Kitchen that wrote this book was sober in the Oxford Group meetings that Bill Wilson came into when he got out of the the the the hospital that he was in.

Vic

had a seizure while making a sales presentation.

It was a it was a really big deal that he was trying to not drink so he could do a good job. He had a seizure in front of the guy and that was kind of what led him to the Oxford Group that and he kept having delirium tremens all the time. So I mean, you know, it's, it's just nice to know that

this is a guy by the name of Sam Shoemaker. Sam Shoemaker was Bill Wilson, spiritual advisor. When Bill got sober, he went to these meetings that his sponsor was going to at this church that that that Sam was was at the Calvary Church in, in New York. Now this is Sam on conversion. And remember, when I'm talking about conversion,

for our purposes, we're talking about, you know, sobriety, about this, this change of mind, this, this thing of becoming whole,

he said. A lot of religious people are like a crowd sitting in this railway station thinking that they're traveling. They hear the names of the trains and the stations. There's the smell of luggage, there's the store of travel, but they never get on the train.

Conversion is where you get on the train. OK, now it's conversion for us is when you stop drinking,

you know, and come along.

Let's see

this is this is Sam on work in the steps and in the Oxford Group and and in early Alcoholics Anonymous. They used to talk about a lot about because they wanted to see them. Scientific

is that it's about making an experiment. Experiment. We don't care. You don't have to believe anything

except that something's happened to us. And just to try it, all we're asking is you just make an honest effort and try it and see what happens. And, and he said that a moral experiment, in other words, working the steps, is worth 10 times an intellectual investigation into apprehending spiritual truth. Obedience is as much the organ of spiritual understanding as reasons. It's like I got to go through the process and see what happens instead of trying to figure it out. You know, how many folks do you walk across and they say

one stuck on the food step?

Really.

Well, I have to figure out what God is

and be able to communicate it to you before I can go on in the steps. No, that's not it. I mean, we got like really smart, brilliant people for centuries that have been trying to do that. You think that because you're withdrawing from alcohol, you have to do it before you can start working the steps.

So in other words, it's an experiment. Just do it and see what happens. That's all we're asking you to do. Just try it

now. This guy is Carl Jung and Carl Jung was a brilliant psychologist

and he helped the guy that sponsored Ebby,

who was really and sponsor who sponsored Bill. So I mean, this is this is a guy that's really significant in Alcoholics Anonymous history. And there's a correspondence that Bill and Carl Ewing had that's one of my favorite pieces of a a literature. It's in a book called The Language of the heart. We've got it in our conference appears. But anyway, he's talking about this drunk

and and he said that his craving for alcohol was

equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.

In other words, in medieval language, the union with God. But you know, he's looking at this guy and he's going, this guy's feeling separate, different. Malone

and alcohol makes him feel whole

and that all of us have that desire for wholeness. And if you were speaking about it in an evil language, you'd call it union with God.

In fact, one of the fun things that that that that you says in in The thing is. So if you were to take, it's interesting that that in the Latin language you use the same word for the highest religious experience

that you do for alcohol, it's spiritus. And so that the way to the way that you combat the spirits is with the Spirit

Bill in his letter to

to Doctor you thanking him for getting the ball rolling with this guy, Roland said. So to you, Doctor Shoemaker of the Oxford Groups, to William James, and to my own physician, Dr. Silkworth who's the guy who wrote the doctor's opinion in the beginning of the book? Were they a a owe this tremendous benefaction, As you will now clearly see, this astonishing chain of events actually started long ago

in your consulting room.

This was Bill Wilson writing to call you thanking him for his contribution to AA. And then the thing that was prior was used response a letter back to Bill.

So this whole thing about OK, now where does this what is this chain of events? How did how did it work? How was it passed on?

Well, here's Frank Bookman. Bookman has this experience that I described to you about hating these people and then writing these letters of apology and suddenly feeling a wholeness in his being and then finding that when he spoke to other people that if they did that thing, if they looked inside of themselves. So he's in China and he's given this talk. And this guy, Sam Shoemaker, who was a young priest at the time, he was there doing some stuff.

Here's Sam, here's Frank talk. And he goes up and he says, hey,

what you're talking about is really cool. Could you come to my Bible study class and and talk to these guys about it? Because I know that if they heard you, they get fired up.

And Franklin said he goes, what's wrong with you

that you don't have the power to carry this message? What's what's up with you?

Sam gets a little pissed off and he goes home that night and he thinks about his life and he goes, you know, in reality, I've been out doing a good job, but what I've basically been doing deep down inside is that I've been a fraud for God, He said. I was playing like I was, I was really throwing all the cards and I wasn't, I was keeping some for me. And he said, OK, so I'm, I'm willing to get in the whole way. And so he goes and he goes through those quick steps with

with Frank and he has an experience and he becomes very active in in

and dynamic in sharing this message with others.

So then Sam goes along and he runs through a circumstances. He runs across this guy, Bud Firestone.

Bud's family was Firestone Rubber Company, had all the money in the world, but it's a good looking guy

as a hammer of a wife. Everything should be fine, except he's one of these guys that when he starts to drink, everything goes sideways and things are not good and they've sent him everywhere and he's not able to do much of anything.

They're trying to get him get him sober and he can't stay sober. And

but anyway, he runs across Sam Shoemaker through through a few friends and and he and Sam get together

and Sin is able to tell him, Hey, look, it's not what you believe, it's what you do.

This is what happened to me.

Bud goes along with it. He tells him about the problems that he's had. He makes the surrender and his drinking obsession leaves him

and the family's thrilled. Family's thrilled. And they're so elated that that later on they have a very big effect in Alcoholics. And honestly, the fire stones are from Akron, OH. And that's where it is that that Bill ends up coming to.

This is Roland Hazard.

Roland

Roland meets with call you Union Hazard had this thing where

Hazards working with him over a year's time.

You think that he's he's pretty much got him where he wants him. He doesn't know that he's alcoholic. He thinks he's a manic depressive, that he's got these problems. He says OK, good, you can go home, you know, glad to see it. He leaves Geneva.

He's on a train home. He stops in Paris. Somebody asked Rolling the wrong question. I believe it was, would you like some wine with your dinner? He says yes, And he's off on a running game, and he can't understand it. He thought he was cured. He goes back to the doctor. He says, hey, it didn't work. What do I got to do now? And the doctor looks at me, says, dude, I didn't realize you're alcoholic.

I can't help people like that.

In fact, nobody can. And this guy goes nobody. He says I got all the money in the world, Come on, you got to be, there's got to be someplace. And he goes, no, there isn't it. I don't know anybody that that that can help people like you. In fact, the only thing that happens is that occasionally here or there people get involved with some kind of a spiritual movement and they have an experience in their drinking career or they're drinking obsession leaves

and said, so put yourself as close as you can to some spiritual movement and

maybe it's it's about as likely as you getting hit by lightning, but maybe lightning will strike you. So give it a shot. And so Roland comes back to New York and it just so happens that the church that his family was involved in with New York was Sam Shoemakers Church. And so he starts drinking and going to meetings.

And then one day he's reading Victoria Kitchen's book on a train and he goes and Victoria and it talks about his alcoholism and his drug use and, and he goes,

oh, I got that.

And it stops. And he does the steps and he gets it. He gets involved and he starts helping others

because that was the big thing in the Oxford group is, is that you can't keep it unless you give it away. It doesn't. It's not something that just stops,

and that's what we found in Alcoholics Anonymous twos, and that's why Bill and Matthew and I are here, is that this is not something that you just get and go home with. It's all we are is we're just a conduit and as long as we keep it flowing through us,

it works. So Roland comes back and he starts getting involved with others. And there was a guy that he knew by the name of Abby and Abby had a little bit of a problem. He'd crashed his parents new car into a house and gotten out of the gotten out of the car and the family was having dinner and and he crashed into the kitchen and he got out and he said I'd like a cup of coffee please.

And the family said that they suited not for not so much for what he did to the house, but it was in his impertinence that really pissed him off.

Who's his attitude? And anyway, and Abby, Abby ends up going he's he's a couple weeks later as well as this and some other things. He's to be locked up in the state asylum for being a chronic inebriate. They had kind of the three strikes law back in those days too, where, you know, if if you get caught three times, we're going to put you away for a year. That's what they used to do with Alcoholics and drug addicts. They just

no recovery. We're just going to put you in a put you in a cage for a while and see what happens when you get out.

I anyway, so Abby is about to about to get sentenced for a year, but it just so happens that another one of these Oxford group guys was the judges son and Roland and and and Sebra come and they say, hey, give them to us. They say the magic words will take him to New York, get him out of state right and and we'll take him to New York and

we'll show him what we got cuz you know, judge, you remember how bad drinkers we were and we're not doing that anymore. He said, great take a So Abby comes to New York and he starts,

he starts doing this Oxford Group work and he's about six weeks sober. And they're saying you got to go work with others. You got to go work with others. And he'd been down on Wall Street, and he'd heard that there was one of this old buddies, Bill Wilson, who is having a really tough time.

And so he goes to a sponsor, says, what about I've got guidance that I'm supposed to go see Bill Wilson? Roland says go get him.

So he makes the call. And that's the story that's in our big book about. My friend sat there while I'm drinking my pineapple juice and gin. And I don't think there was a crack pipe in the bathroom, but I'm sure there would have been if that would have been that, you know? But but anyway,

Ebby, Ebby and Bill are are sitting. It's a nice image, isn't it? There's a meditation for you Bill on crack,

but but in the in his story, he talks about, you know, high-powered sedatives. You know, he can see him just you can see him just laid out there.

But

but anyway, so Bill sitting there and every comes by and he visits him and he's and and Bill said, well, what's the deal? And Ebby says, I've got religion and Bill just wants to throw him out of the house. He goes, you know, don't give me that. I'm a scientific guy. I'm smart. Don't give me this God crap, you know, and but Abby says, well, you know, we're not talking, I'm not talking about any variety. I'm not talking about any brand.

Just pick whatever would work for you.

And that's what the Oxford Group talked about it. You know, they happen to be a Christian movement, but they said, you know, pick where, start wherever you're at and see where you end up. But you got to, you got to try, you got to, you got to get on the train. And Bill ends up, you know, coming to come into town's hospital and, and, and Abby comes by and takes him through the 1st

eight steps

and Bill leaves. Abby has our Abby leaves and Bill has this tremendous white light experience.

And

and from that, you know, this message gets out of the Oxford Group. And he started, or I mean, out of the hospital, he starts going to these Oxford Group meetings and he's looking for drunks because in the experience that he had, it was one drunk talking to another. And so he's looking for Alcoholics. And I actually talked with people that went to Oxford Group meetings with him and they said, yeah, he was weird. He'd come early to the meeting and he'd say, are there any drunks that come to this group

now? The Oxford group was not focused on Alcoholics. They'd say, well, we got people with problems

and, and it said, and they said,

you know, I don't know if there's people with alcohol problems, they'll always go, if they're drunks, give them to me, I can help them. And he really thought at one point he actually said when he was given a bill, said when he was given an Oxford group, it's once that he was going to be able to serve up all the drunks in the world.

Yeah. So anyway, here this is, here's this message. Here's a guy who had a drinking problem, was powerless over alcohol, unable to to do anything in his life. Runs across a guy that had the same problem that isn't living like that anymore, that had done some simple steps, you know, and really simple steps, you know,

sharing with the problem was

asking for help from a power greater than themselves, going out and cleaning stuff up and then asking for direction and helping others,

you know, and, and what and the problems lifted.

So bills running around doing this stuff

and what happens he gets, he ends up in Akron. He'd been to Akron before, hadn't had any problems when he was there, but now he's in Akron and there's problems and he makes a call and he ends up getting a hold of this guy, Doctor Bob, who ends up being the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now the interesting thing is, is that Bob and and the date that we call our birthday isn't the date that Bill Wilson gets sober.

It isn't the date that Bill and Bob meet

because they met and Bob stopped drinking for a little while and then he had a really good idea to go to Atlanta. And you guys all know what happens when you go to Atlanta, right? Of course you get toasted and, and, and he ends up coming back home and he's and he's completely a mess. And Bill helps him through a day,

through a couple days. I think it was, it was over the weekend. He doctor Bob had a surgery to do on on on Monday. And so they, they, they gave him a sauerkraut and stewed tomatoes.

You talk about abuse, you know, and try and help him sober up. And then on the way to the hospital, Bill gives him another couple bottles of beer and a goofball

so that he can do his surgery. Doctor Bob was a proctologist. OK. And there are those who say that the person who gave the most for Alcoholics Anonymous was the guy who had the operation on his ass that morning. But anyway, so Bob has a has a goofball and a couple bottles of beer. He's about to go into the hospital. He turns to his sponsor. He turns to Bill and he says I'm going to go through with it.

And he goes into the IT goes into the operating room and Bill goes back to the House and he's sitting there waiting with

and Bob's wife. And he doesn't come home.

And you know what that means? He's out on a run again

and he didn't come home till late at night and, and there and, and when he does come home, you know, they're, they're, they're worried.

They're, they're emotional. And what's where you been? And he said, I've been out mending fences. See, the thing that Bob would not do was he wouldn't do the restitution stuff 'cause he thought it was going to hurt his business being a doctor.

But what he did when he got out of the hospital, out of working on that guy that day, is he went around and he started making amends. And that's the day that we count as the start of Alcoholics Anonymous. So it's not the day that he stopped drinking, it's the day that he started to make restitution. So the day that he started to do stuff, not just sit around and agree with it.

And Bob

ends up because he's a doctor working at Saint Thomas Hospital and getting drunks to roll through there and, and he worked with like thousands and thousands of Alcoholics, sponsoring them, getting them through this just real simple stuff.

And then here's Bill and and Marty, Marty man. And, and if you haven't read it, there's a wonderful new biography about this woman. And she's one of the great stories in, in NAA. Her her story of the big book is women suffer too

and she was one of these gals. I'm sure you guys have all run across women like this that

can drink you under the table.

She was a real allergic type, came from a lot of money, had a lot of great stuff going for and then the stock market took all that away and she was a hopeless chronic alcohol. She reached the point she'd been a high society woman where she is actually being taken in as a charity case in a in an insane asylum. And the guy who was working with her was a high end, was a high end sanitarium. And the guy was working with her was a guy by the name of Harry Tebow.

And Doctor Tebow was was working with her and he got sick one day. And so he wasn't able to do his normal practice. So he started going through his mail. And in his mail was a copy of the big book, this multi lift thing that they were sending out for people to check out. And you read it and he goes, I know somebody like this. He gave it to Marty, and Marty starts reading the book and she, Oh my God, there are other people like me

because that's what that book does, you know, as it is. Oh,

powerless. I got that. She's reading more about then she gets to the God stuff and she goes, oh, not that throws it away. And a couple days later, she gets ticked at one of the other workers there at the at the sanitarium. And she says,

I'll just go drink at them.

And then she remembered that when she was reading more about alcoholism, it talks about going out and deliberately drinking at people.

And then she remembers that she has this tremendous experience, kind of like Bills, one of these white light experiences. And

she doesn't know what to do because the last time she had an experience like that, she'd taken a step out of a hotel room. She thought she could fly. So she runs to the to the doctor and she says, you know, am I insane? Same thing Bill did with, with Shoemaker. And Tebow says, oh, no, no, no, no. I've read about that stuff. And William James's book, lots of people have had it. She said you go back and read that book.

And so she goes back and keeps reading the book a couple days later, ends up at her first a, a meeting when a was just like 10 or 12 people meeting in New York and and she ends up quitting drinking. And this is the woman that started the National Council on Alcoholism. That that, that was involved with Bill's parents and what they called the Big 12 step that really helped fundamentally change the way that medicine and that the legal system looks at the disease of alcoholism.

I mean, this woman did incredible, incredible work so that you and I can be here and not be locked up and, and, and having the things happen to us that that not that we all haven't been locked up and needed to be locked up, but that's another story.

No thanks.

So let's do a little meditation if we will. I'd like you guys if you would just close your eyes for a minute

and let's just let's just spend a little time and think about what it is that that happened to you. OK?

So let's take a deep breath

and

why don't we go back to that first place

that you went to an AAA meeting at?

What kind of a hall was it?

How are the chairs set up?

What was on the walls

but it did smell like.

And in your minds eye, go around the room

and think of the people that were there

and how did they greet you

and how did they treat you.

And then think about your sponsor

and their friends

and their families.

And how it is that you got together with that person,

what they taught you?

And then think about

the folks

that you have tried to pass this message on to.

Wonderful.

Now, as I mentioned to you last night,

Sam Shoemaker used to always say that you have to give it away in order to get it.

And I started sponsoring my first people when I was 28 days sober.

And when I when I called my sponsor and said, what do I do? He said. You know, you just do what I've done with you.

And remember that if they're sick enough to ask you for help, you can't hurt them.

You can't hurt them. All we're doing is just being a vehicle, be in a change, passing this message on, just saying, hey, look, I had a problem. I used to be like this. I couldn't stop drinking. I couldn't stop using. I couldn't stop lying. I couldn't stay out of jail. And then I met somebody

that didn't live like that anymore, and all they did was they asked for help from whatever it was

that created us

that that they went out and made restitution and that they tried to be helpful to others.

So that's our little

thing about the way that sponsorship actually the, the history of it. And now my friend Bill

is going to go through and we're going to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of after a a started to get rolling. Because one of the things that happened was, is they found out that drunks were OK hanging out with the nice people and all that stuff, but they had a real difficult time with it. So they they started having meetings of their own and later on it became what we call Alcoholics.

We're alcoholic.

Great stuff.

After we do this, we're going to take a little break.

You hear a lot of things in a A and, and one of the things you hear is this different than the phrase we're using is you got to give it away to keep it.

We really think that you've got to give it away to even get it.

And what's the IT? What's, what's the program?

And if you really study the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the things you come to realize that the big book, as they put it together, was a sales tool. It was a promo thing. They threw this thing out there and they're trying to recruit people. They were these guys. You got to stop and think about this. You had Bill Wilson, the failed stock speculator. He wasn't a broker. He was a speculator. He didn't have a broker's license.

You had Hank Parkhurst, the used car salesman. You know, they formed a company selling car wax that never sold any car wax. And they produced fake stock certificates to try to get money to publish the book, which they later had to pay all that money back to all those people to put money up to it. And then the third guy was Bill D, who was a lawyer, of course,

and ran for public office and lost. So this is who our founders were. These guys were promoters where they lit up.

Had something happened to them? Absolutely, absolutely. They all had had these profound spiritual experiences. So they used the skills that they had and they came out with this book. Now many of you have probably heard Chapter 5 prior to the editing where there was no suggestions, there was none of this stuff. And it was you will do this and you will do that. And then probably because the light shone down on them and God came to them and said no, no, no,

they pass this around. They said the 1st 100 people, there were only 77. They lied to us up front, okay? And they passed it around and these guys began to edit it. And they said, look, if we tell it like it really is, they'll run screaming down the street. We'll never get any letters. So we need to soften the approach.

So they came out with the big book that we all know and love now and it's all suggestions and it's real easy and soft and kind of touchy feely. In 1940 or 41, depending upon who you're reading about this document, Bob Smith came up with this Akron manual, and at that time you had guys. This was right after the book had come out, but before the real

onslaught of people, before the Jack Alexander article

and stuff, before people really started flooding into AAA. They had guys that were traveling around the country, traveling salesman that said, look, I'm going to Atlanta. We all know what happens in Atlanta. And, and I'm a little worried, what should I do? What do I do? How do I carry this message? And they had questions, practical questions. What should I do? First, second, third, 4th. So a bunch of the boys got together and they came up with this Aquin manual and this was kind of an inside document.

This wasn't something they were handing out to people. This was just for themselves. This is a how to manual. And I think that I'm pretty sure this is exactly what they were actually doing and how they were actually talking compared to what came out in the big book. So I'm just going to read a few excerpts. Now. I'm not proposing that we go back to this, but when you hear people talk about we need to go back to the basics, back to how this is what was really going on, you tell

If you would like to go back to this now, some of it's kind of attractive, Some of it you'd really love to tell to people, you know, But the other parts that are kind of iffy, it says here, First off, explain that we are not in the business of sobering up drunks merely to have them go on another Bender. Explain that our aim is total and permanent sobriety.

Not one time in this document does it say one day at a time. It doesn't even allude to it.

Definition of an Alcoholic Anonymous An Alcoholic Anonymous is an alcoholic who, through application of and adherence to the rules laid down by the organization, has completely forceful in the use of any and all alcoholic beverages. The moment he wittingly drinks so much as a drop of beer, wine, spirits or any other alcoholic drink, he automatically loses all status as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You're Out

is not interested in sobering up drunks who are not sincere in their desire to remain completely sober for all time.

This is a rather large commitment

to the newcomer. It is your life,

it is your choice, if you are not completely convinced to your own satisfaction that you are an alcoholic, that your life has become unmanageable, if you are not ready to part with alcohol forever. It would be better for all concerned if you discontinued reading this and give up the idea of becoming a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.